The War of the Worlds

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Poster for the Italian release of the motion picture The War of the Worlds, directed by Byron Haskin, 1953 (United States).From a private collection

SUMMARY: The story, which details 12 days in which invaders from Mars attack the planetEarth, captured popular imagination with its fast-paced narrative and images of Martians and interplanetary travel. The humans in The War of the Worlds initially treat the invasion with complacency but soon are provoked into a defensive state of war. The novel helped launch the career of actor and director Orson Welles when he presented an adaptation of it on his radio program, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, on October 30, 1938. The simulated news broadcast of a Martian landing in New Jersey, complete with regularly updated news bulletins, provoked panic in America, though of course exaggerated by the media; it is testament to the greatness of Wells’s fiction. Later radio adaptations also produced mass hysteria, including an incident in Ecuador that resulted in several deaths.

DETAIL: Like so many of H. G. Wells’s pioneering science fiction texts, The War of the Worlds introduces a theme that was to find countless imitations. His work has been reproduced directly in film, comic book, and even progressive rock, but perhaps the most well-known exploration is Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of 1938.

The plot is simple: a strange disk lands on Horsell Common, Surrey, and eventually hatches. The alien inside is malevolent, destroying all with its “heat ray” and striking terror in the heart with the eerie battle cry of “ulla.” Humanity seems powerless in its wake, and the Martians easily seize control.

The grandeur of Wells’s vision is at once simple and deeply complex, suggesting humanity’s inherent fallibility and lack of control over its destiny. At the same time, Wells introduces a series of underlying motifs that question prevailing social and moral beliefs. Finally, the spectacle of the Martians is both awe- and fear-inspiring, and the nature of the aliens themselves has been continually reinterpreted since the novel’s first publication.

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